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Some high points require expert skill, a bit of luck, and probably some suffering. Not these. Here are 14 peaks high on views, low on effort that don’t play hard to get.
Ryan Driscoll, Justin Guarino and Nick Aiello-Popeo Send The Medusa Face on Mt. Neacola
Chris Kalman
[Photo] Nick Aiello-Popeo
From April 18-25 2021, Ryan Driscoll, Justin Guarino and Nick Aiello-Popeo made the first ascent of the north face (or Medusa Face) of Mt. Neacola, in the Neacola Mountains of Alaska s Aleutian Range. They followed the line of Topher Donahue and Kennan Harvey s 1995 attempt for the first roughly 3,500 feet, before adding more than 800 vertical feet of new sustained M6 and A2 climbing on decomposing rock. The final six pitches took 12 hours to climb.
It didn t bother the three New Hampshire-based climbers that Donahue and Harvey had been on the face before, or that Donahue had recounted in the 1996 American Alpine Journal, Midnight found us at the top of the face, about 800 feet of easy climbing below the summit.
At mile three of the trail to Harding Icefield in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park, I found myself scrambling up bare rock, the glacier nowhere in sight. The summer sun beat down on my shoulders, wavering into a heat-haze above the forest below. Still, I didn’t slow my pace, drawn by the lure of ice far above.
This was to be my last big hike before I went back to the Lower 48. Leading the way was Pang, my boss at a Seward accounting firm, who over the preceding months had become my partner in adventure. She moved to Seward when she was young and we bonded over our shared immigrant experience her from Thailand, me from Somalia. We’d both had to figure out how to assimilate into a place while holding onto pieces of our own culture. The resilience built from that experience yielded the toughness needed for long and difficult backcountry trips. I had taken the seasonal job in Seward the same week my family left the States for Somalia for what they had planned to be a year but